my headphones play a broken song (only i can hear)
by alovelyghost
Summary: She looks at Grief. Grief looks back. [Cross posted on Ao3]


Hamuko is no stranger to grief. It has always been there, in the corner of her eye, threatening to swallow her if she looks directly at it. The thing is, she's learned not to look - always far more worried about Minato's health and well-being. He's always been the more sensitive of the two, after all, even if it never seemed so.

He hadn't been afraid of death, either, she knows. _His_ death, at least. He never was, even before the accident, more concerned about other people than he ever was about himself. And that was his downfall, wasn't it? Of course he'd die to save his friends. It was a logical conclusion, natural almost, so purely him that she's surprised she didn't predict it in the first place.

That doesn't make it hurt any less.

The funeral is . . . hard.

Everyone mourns the loss of Minato Arisato, who died due to a mysterious illness no one even knew he had. _Died too young_, they say. _I'll miss him_, they say.

_I'm sorry_, they tell her.

It's almost okay, except for the part of her that screams and cries that they don't know of his sacrifice, what he did for them - no, they think it was illness that took him. It feels cruel for him to have made a sacrifice and to never be remembered for it. Like it takes away some of the sadness of his death.

Someone mentions that he made his goodbyes, before. That it was weird, but they didn't think anything of it until . . . well. It is meant as a comfort, yet only serves to make Hamuko feel worse, like a pickaxe slowly chipping at the dam she has made to store her tears.

He said his goodbyes to her, too, she knows.

She wishes she had known that's what it was.

Wishes are all she is made of, these days. Wishes that he'll come back, that they never said yes to stupid SEES and stupid shadows and stupid Ikutsuki. Wishes that it was her, not him, or that they found another way to seal Nyx. Or that Nyx never existed at all.

Her dam of tears is broken when she has to give his eulogy. She doesn't even remember what she said, only the faces of his friends - her friends - _their_ friends looking up at her with so much sympathy and pain, and it's just too much.

It's an open casket.

She can't bring herself to look.

Even so, she knows what she'll find - a Minato who looks almost sleeping, if sickly, wearing his favorite sweater and the headphones Fuuka gave him draped around his neck. Hamuko had insisted those be buried with him. "How will he listen to music with no headphones?" she had said. Mitsuru had smiled gently, understandingly, and the headphones had made it in.

(The old ones sit on her desk. She's not sure who put them there, but she's thankful anyways.)

At some point, his friends approach. Her friends approach. _Their_ friends approach. The members of SEES hang back and watch, and intervene when it gets too much for her.

After the funeral, there is nothing.

Nothing, no one, just her and her tears and the abyss into which she wishes to crawl so desperately. It is harder to pretend he's still there when she watched the coffin go down, down, down, laid to rest right next to their parents, but it is not much harder. She slips up often enough to concern the others, at least, though she knows that they too struggle with the past tense. It's so much easier to talk about him in present tense.

Food piles, piles, piles, disappears. Piles, piles, piles, disappears. She eats some of it, sometimes. She's never really been a big eater anyways, but some days she finds herself dragged to the kitchen and force fed by Shinji.

Everyone starts talking about the future, suddenly. They ask her what she plans to do, how she's going to spend her last year of school, where she's going to live. She deflects the questions because she can't picture a future that doesn't have Minato in it.

Mitsuru says she plans to start a group like SEES, but with adults. "This can't be the only documented case of shadows and persona users," she says. "You can join when you graduate, if you want." Hamuko tells her she'll think about it. She doesn't.

When she asks, Akihiko goes on about becoming a police officer. "It's dangerous, of course," he says. "But I think it'll be worth it."

Shinji has to repeat his 3rd year because he missed most of it. "Maybe we'll be in the same class," he says. "So you won't be alone."

And that's it, isn't it? She's alone now. Alone, alone, alone. The word sounds wrong in her head and on her tongue, like it doesn't exist. It shouldn't exist. Shouldn't, shouldn't, shouldn't, but it does, and that's the worst part. She's never been alone.

"You're starting to act like him, you know," Yukari says one day, sometime at the end of the summer. It's light, teasing, so Hamuko gives it a soft laugh. Is this how he felt? That the feeling of solitude is better than the fear that anyone could be ripped away from you at any moment? That your own death doesn't matter in the list of fears because you're too busy worrying about being alone?

Except he wasn't alone, and she is, now. There are no shadows to distract her, no Tartarus, no Velvet Room. Just her and her thoughts, and the grief that hovers in the corner of her eye.

She looks at Grief.

Grief looks back.


End file.
